Smashed Squirrels

When I wake up in the morning I watch the sun come up on the neighborhood trees. Before the Big Wind I would watch the neighborhood squirrels darting from their home in that palm tree, along the electric and telephone wires to the huge pine tree in front of my apartment. Sometimes I would watch the crows or the green parrots on the same wires. No more. Where are they? Adrian noticed this too. The squirrels didn't just entertain me in the morning, they were always scarpering about. No more. We decided that the big wind picked them all up and blew them. . . where? Is there a block wall with animal and bird bodies smashed into it? Or are our birds now in Temecula? If you see them, let them know I miss them.
Pie perfection. In his eternal quest to increase diabetes in the San Gabriel Valley, Adrian has now perfected the lemon meringue pie. He is working through the fruits of the season, despite Emily asking for peach whenever anything else shows up. Summer, Emily. For now, lemon.
Natalie posted this great picture on her blog. Love this family.

Reading continues. This week I've juxtaposed The Drop, Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch mystery, with BossyPants by Tina Fey. Both good. Fey's book seems to me like it would be more pleasing for women than men. I recounted some of the passages that made me think so to Adrian. He agrees. She reads the book so it has her wry tone. I like that. And I've found a great new to me podcast - Best of the Left. Always interesting. One thing it has underscored for me is that folks on the left are not the final aribters on truth. We miss it sometimes ourselves.

I've signed up for two new PALAC groups that will start in January. One is about ginseng collecting along the China and North Korean border. The other is based on Montaigne's essays. Should be fun.

OH MY!!! (Updated)

Did you hear that we had a big wind in Southern California? Kajillion mph winds blew through on Wednesday night and toppled trees, took out electricity, and ruined my life. You may think that is a little severe and I would agree. It didn't take out electricity everywhere. In fact, the people in the house on the corner, just down the hill from us had their GX DX porch light on all night, proclaiming their poweredness to all us poor fools up the hill.

Adrian was driving home during the big wind. He said it was stunning. I'm happy he made it home safe. First thing I thought of was the packages of chopped up bunny that I am going to use to make a rabbit terrine in a couple of weeks and the rabbit legs I had confit-ed earlier in the week. This is expensive stuff. I didn't want it to die in a dead freezer. Adrian's first thought was that he promised to make a chocolate cake for his fans. Our second thought was that we would not have Internet connectivity and we couldn't recharge any of our electronics. Groan.

We took the freezer stuff to my old boss Bill's house. They have a beautiful home in an area we thought would be most likely to have trees down and electricity off. Luckily, no. So we got to power up our cell phones and iPod. Then we came home and made a cake by hand. Sure, people have done that for hundreds of years, just not us. Until Thursday. It looked really pretty.

Still no electricity on Friday. I was pretty miserable. I couldn't update my podcasts, I'd buzzed through everything I had on my iPod. I went to bed on Thursday night at 6:00. Sun is down at 5:00, my apartment is pretty dark anyway (except for that porch light down the road.) and candles don't give you Internet connectivity. I listened to a really good book, The Night Circus, throughout the night. I have been relistening continually because a lot of stuff happens in this book. Went to bed at 5:30 on Friday, thinking, now I know how depressed feels.

I was miserable. Yes, I felt like a naked rat mole. I just wanted to stay in bed with my slow metabolism and try to keep warm. How the Hell do people survive really major disasters? I guess the secret is that humans are resilient. My major problem was not having control over when electricity was coming back. If I knew the answer was never, I could make plans and move on.

At 5:45 on Saturday morning, our electricity came back. The bathroom light went on and two Norman's jumped up. Adrian got up to turn off the light. I got up to turn it back on and then turn on my laptop. Ahhhhh. LIG.

UPDATE: Just saw this about the damage to the Arboretum in Arcadia. We used to drive out to the arboretum when we were kids and have visited often since moving to the area. This is very sad news.